Recapturing the celebratory voice of
Africa in poems that are both contemporary and traditional,
Liberian-born Patricia Jabbeh Wesley weaves lyrical storytelling
with oral history and images of Africa and America, revealing
powerful insights about the relationship between strength and
tragedy—and finding reason to celebrate even in the presence
of war, difficulties, and death.

Rooted in myths that can be traced
to the Grebo tradition, Becoming Ebony portrays Liberian-born
Wesley’s experiences of village talk and civil war as well as
her experiences of the pain of her mother’s death and the
difficulties of rearing a family away from home in the United
States, and explores the questions of living in the African
Diaspora. Turning on the African proverb of “the wandering
child” and the metaphor of the ebony tree—which is beautiful
in life and death— these poems delve into issues of human
suffering and survival, plainly and beautifully chronicling what
happens “after the sap is gone."

—Publisher

Wesley writes with
clear-eyed lyricism about her ruthless and beleaguered homeland,
and the bittersweet relief and loss of the diaspora. Her poems
are scintillating and vivid, quickly sketched fables shaped by
recollections of childhood playmates, moonlight and ocean surf,
hibiscus hedges, and big pots of boiling soup. But these paeans
to home blend with percussive visions of falling rockets and
murdered children, sharp recollections of hunger and mourning,
and a survivor's careful gratitude in a land of cold winds and
rationed sunlight, her carefully measured memories and cherished
dreams of return.

—Booklist(starred review), Spotlight on Black History

[T]he strength of
this collection is that it does not allow itself to wallow in
the bleakness of sentiment. . . . In almost every section of the
book, the reader is faced both with the brutal realities of life
in parts of the world, and the lyric's possibilities for
delineating a space that can act against them.

—Publishers
Weekly

Patricia Jabbeh
Wesley's lush collection of poems Becoming Ebony is in
many respects a memoir of the life she lost when she was forced
to flee Liberia because of war. Naturally, a longing for family
and the familiarity of home permeates this book. However, this
is not simply a poetry of mourning or an excursion into some
wistful fantasy of an African life. We are given a complex view
of a society that was unmade by political convulsion and the
resulting violence. Consequently, there is a meditative
seriousness throughout. But these poems are shaped by
combinations of humor, sharp sass, and anger and are conveyed
with the kind of frankness and warmth that two friends share
when they haven't seen each other in years. Another feature of
this collection is Wesley's deft exploration of the quieter
frictions between women and men, which clearly transcend
national and cultural boundaries. I turn to poetry for the
chance to see the difficult world rendered clearly and made
bearable again. Becoming Ebony is a book that does this
generously.

—Tim
Seibles,author of Hammerlock
and Hurdy-Gurdy

The poems of Patricia Jabbeh
Wesley are fearless, eye-opening, breathtaking, and
compassionate. She writes of a homeland devastated by war and
violence, of a culture's survival beneath the flames of that
war, and of the everyday courage of people whose stories would
be lost if not for these poems. Wesley writes of her Liberia
with urgency and with artistry, in poems that remain in the mind
and heart long after the reader has closed Becoming Ebony.
These are political poems in the best sense of the word—wise,
necessary, undeniable.

In this her
fourth volume, I witness Patricia Jabbeh Wesley
courageously dipping her pen into her own wound and
splashing vivid imagery upon the canvas of her own
skin. That is an illusion, for that pen is really a
scalpel cutting the gangrenous and the rotten out of
her nation's violated flesh. But that too is an
illusion. That scalpel is a steel tongue in a
powerful Grebo woman's mouth weaving a fine gauze
from dirges, love songs, praise songs, fragments of
aphoristic wisdom, fables, new myths, narrative and
lyrical dialogues in order to bind our own wounded
psyches.

Proud Grebo
women's voices burst through her mouth to chastise
depraved men who harvest babies to stoke diamond
wars as they blaze through forests of dry human
bones in their imported death chariots. Beyond
celebrating these fiery taboo-breaking warrior women
who are passionate about peace, justice, their right
to forbidden fantasies, she also claims her place,
though exiled, in the lineage. Condemned to bear
upon her back her home, she is the strong earthen
vessel that safeguards the essential spiritual Grebo
values bequeathed to her by the village elders in a
circle. Because moving is never a leaving, memories
of home constantly surge through the poet's wry
humor and wit that serve as balm for the
ever-nagging pain.

To honor her ancestors' memories Wesley has planted
these enduring trees whose fruits must nourish us all if
we are willing to avail ourselves of her poetic gifts.
These are brave and fearless poems in a harsh dark
season, yet necessary for the witness they bear to human
folly while insisting on our capacity to love. With each
new volume, her voice grows stronger as it blends with
those of Ama Ata Aidoo, Alda do Espirito Santo, and Jeni
Couzyn. She is without doubt among the most powerful of
the younger generation of African poets.—Frank
M. Chipasula, editor,
Bending the Bow: An Anthology of African Poetry/
co-editor of
The Heinemann Book of African Women's Poetry